The 200-Year Fight for Abortion Access

We tend to take
reproductive rights for granted, but from a historical ­perspective, they were
won almost yesterday. In the 18th and early-19th centuries, abortion was legal
before “quickening,” the point at which a woman could feel her fetus move, usually
in the fourth month of pregnancy; abortion after that was considered a
common-law misdemeanor. From that point on in this country, there have been
battles and negotiations over women’s reproductive lives. (For more on how abortion’s past could become its future, click here.)

200 Years of Abortion

1800

1820s–1830s: Abortifacient herbs and fungi such as savin, pennyroyal, and ergot often kill the women who use them. So states begin to pass poison-control measures, the country’s first abortion-regulation statutes.

1821: Connecticut passes
the first statutory abortion regulation in the U.S., banning the use of poison
to induce abortions after quickening. The punishment is a life sentence.

1840s: Abortionist Madame
Restell makes a fortune and scandalizes New York society, advertising her
abortifacients in newspapers.

1857: The new American Medical Association begins a campaign to criminalize abortion — partly an effort to put midwives and homeopaths out of business.

1869: The Catholic Church
condemns abortion at any stage of pregnancy.

1873: Congress passes the Comstock Law, which bans information about and distribution of contraceptives. Twenty-four states subsequently pass similar laws regulating the sale and use of contraceptives.

1880s: Almost all states
have laws criminalizing abortion.

1880s: Abortionists’
tools at the Museum of Contraception and Abortion in Vienna — one tool dating
as early as the 1880s.

1900

1916: Margaret
Sanger is arrestedfor opening the country’s first birth-control clinic in
Brooklyn, the precursor to Planned Parenthood.

1930: Abortion is the
official cause of death for 2,700 women, nearly one-fifth of all maternal
deaths that year.

1951: Sanger enlists
scientist Gregory Pincus to develop a “magic pill,” which will become the first
oral contraceptive.

1950s: Women in East
Germany use the violently vibrating washing machine the “Schallwäscher” to end
unwanted pregnancies by placing it on their stomachs.

1970: Hawaii is the first
state to legalize abortion. New York repeals its law criminalizing abortion
soon after.

1971: The Supreme Court
agrees to hear the case of Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) against Henry Wade, the
Dallas D.A. who enforced a Texas law banning abortion except in cases of life
endangerment.

1972: In the year before Roe
v. Wade is decided,an estimated 130,000 women have illegal or
self-induced abortions. Over 100,000 women travel to New York City for an
abortion, 50,000 of them traveling more than 500 miles.

1973: In a 7-2 decision,
the Supreme Court grantswomen the right to terminate pregnancies under the
14th Amendment with Roe v. Wade.

1976: Congress passes the
Hyde Amendment, barring the use of Medicaid and other federal funding for
abortions.

1982: Pennsylvania passes
the Abortion Control Act, which imposes a 24-hour waiting period, requires
married women to inform their husbands, and mandates parental consent for
minors.

1984: A clinic and two doctors’ offices in Pensacola, Florida, are bombed by abortion opponents.

1992:Planned Parenthood
v. Casey affirms the core ruling of Roe v. Wade but also
upholds much of the Abortion Control Act. States will be allowed to restrict
abortion access short of imposing an “undue burden.”

1993: Dr. David Gunn is
shot and killed by a protester outside his clinic in Pensacola, the first known
killing of an abortion provider in the U.S.

1994: In July, Dr. John
Bayard Britton and a clinic volunteer are shot and killed outside a Pensacola
clinic. In December, two are killed and five are wounded during a shooting
rampage at two Massachusetts abortion clinics.

1998: In January, a nail
bomb explodes outside a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, killing a guard and
maiming a nurse. Later that year, James C. Kopp shoots Dr. Barnett Slepian, a
Buffalo abortion doctor, through his kitchen window.

2000

2000: In June, the Nebraska
statute banning “partial-birth abortion” is ruled unconstitutional because it
doesn’t make an exemption for preserving the life of the mother, invalidating
29 other state laws.

2000: In September, the FDA
approves the abortion pill mifepristone (RU-486) after a decade-long campaign
by activists and health-care providers.

2003: Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”), who says she regrets her role in the landmark court case, files a motion with a U.S. District Court in Dallas to overturn Roe v. Wade.

2007: The Supreme Court
effectively reverses its 2000 ruling on “partial-birth abortion,” upholding a
2003 federal law banning the procedure.

2009: Dr. George Tiller, one of few providers of late-term abortions, is shot and killed while attending church in Kansas.

2015: In March, 33-year-old
Indiana woman Purvi
Patel is sentenced to 20 years after self-aborting with medication she
ordered online. In December, 31-year-old Tennessee woman Anna Yocca is charged
with first-degree attempted murder for trying to self-abort with a coat hanger.

2015: In June, the Dutch
pro-choice group Women on Waves sends a drone carrying packages of abortion
pills on its maiden flight from Germany to Poland, where abortion is severely
restricted. The official number of abortions performed in Poland, a country of
38 million, is only about 750 per year, but Women on Waves says the real number
is closer to 240,000.

2015: In November, Robert
L. Dear Jr. opens fire at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, killing
three and wounding nine. A self-described “warrior for the babies,” he is later
found mentally incompetent and unfit to stand trial.

2016: States have enacted 1,074 abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade, more than a quarter of them since 2010.